Yahoo! and Samsung form multi-year partnership to deliver Interactive TV — from dailyfinance.com by Business Wirevia The Motley Fool
Partnership to provide real-time, enhanced entertainment and advertising to homes across the United States

Excerpt:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. & RIDGEFIELD PARK, N.J.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Yahoo! (NAS: YHOO) and Samsung today announced an expanded multi-year partnership to integrate Yahoo!’s Broadcast Interactivity platform into Samsung 2012 Smart TVs. Yahoo! Broadcast Interactivity, powered by its automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, SoundPrintTM, will be deployed in Samsung’s SyncPlus platform, enabling new opportunities for intelligent content discovery, advertising and engagement, bringing an unprecedented level of interactivity in the living room.

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From DSC:
Another steps towards:

 

The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV

 

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A fifth of TV sets connected to the Internet by 2016 — from digitaltvresearch.com

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Welcome to Star Scholar U., where a personal brand is the credential — from The Chronicle by By Jeffrey R. Young

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Welcome to Star Scholar U 2

Keri Rasmussen for The Chronicle

Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason U., helped build an online-education site, Marginal Revolution U, based on a blog he runs with Alex Tabarrok. “In part we did it just to show it could be done—that you can have a Web site which looks nice and works,” Mr. Cowen said.

 

Excerpt:

A new kind of university has begun to emerge: Call it Star Scholar U.

Professors with large followings and technical prowess are breaking off to start their own online institutions, delivering courses with little or no backing from traditional campuses.

Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.

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5 perspectives on the future of the human interface — from techcrunch.com by Alex Williams

Excerpt:

The next generation of apps will require developers to think more of the human as the user interface. It will become more about the need to know how an app works while a person stands up or with their arms in the air more so than if they’re sitting down and pressing keys with their fingers.

Also see:

 

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Rethinking carrots: A new method for measuring what players find most rewarding and motivating about your game — from gamasutra.com by Scott Rigby, Richard Ryan

Excerpt:

The Player Experience of Need Satisfaction model (PENS) outlines three basic psychological needs, those of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, that we have demonstrated lie at the heart of the player’s fun, enjoyment, and valuing of games. By collecting players’ reports of how these needs are being satisfied, the PENS model can strongly and significantly predict positive experiential and commercial outcomes, in many cases much more strongly than more traditional measures of fun and enjoyment. And despite the simplicity of the model conceptually, it shows promise as a “unified theory” of the player experience by demonstrating predictive value regardless of genre, platform, or even the individual preferences of players.

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Pearson project will let professors mix free and paid content in e-textbooks — from The Chronicle by Alisha Azevedo

Excerpt:

Pearson, a major textbook publisher, continued its push into digital education on Monday by introducing a service that allows instructors to create e-textbooks using open-access content and Pearson material.

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A river of data — from educationnext.org by Bror Saxberg
Making the learning experience more effective

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How should teaching change in the age of Siri?– from MindShift

Excerpt:

 Short of banning smartphones (a short-term solution, at best), the evolution of artificial intelligence services like Siri means that there will be a shift from a focus on finding the answer as the endpoint to a greater focus on analysis. You have the answer, but so what? What does that answer mean in a real-life situation?

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Degreed launches crowdfunding campaign for reimagined ‘digital diploma’ — from gigaom.com by Ki Mae Heussner
San Francisco startup Degreed is challenging the traditional college diploma with an online service that tracks and scores educational achievements from established institutions as well as new online learning platforms. Ahead of a public launch in 2013, Degreed this week began a crowd funding campaign.

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A capitalist’s dilemma, whoever wins on Tuesday — from the New York Times by Clayton Christensen

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

In a way, this mirrors the microeconomic paradox explored in my book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which shows how successful companies can fail by making the “right” decisions in the wrong situations. America today is in a macroeconomic paradox that we might call the capitalist’s dilemma. Executives, investors and analysts are doing what is right, from their perspective and according to what they’ve been taught. Those doctrines were appropriate to the circumstances when first articulated — when capital[From DSC: or from an educational perspective, we could use the word information] was scarce.

But we’ve never taught our apprentices that when capital is abundant and certain new skills are scarce, the same rules are the wrong rules. Continuing to measure the efficiency of capital prevents investment in empowering innovations that would create the new growth we need because it would drive down their RONA, ROCE and I.R.R.

 

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Gartner sees 821M unit smart device mkt in 2012; 1.2B 2013 — from forbes.com by Eric Savitz

 

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The  article, “Technology changing how students learn, teachers say,” reminds me of the graphic below. It appears that teachers now have a definite answer to the question I was asking back in June 2010:

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If attention can be visualized as a gate...is it getting harder to get through the gate?

 

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Teachers who were not involved in the surveys echoed their findings in interviews, saying they felt they had to work harder to capture and hold students’ attention.

“I’m an entertainer. I have to do a song and dance to capture their attention,” said Hope Molina-Porter, 37, an English teacher at Troy High School in Fullerton, Calif., who has taught for 14 years. She teaches accelerated students, but has noted a marked decline in the depth and analysis of their written work.

 

Bottom line:
Like so much in life, we have very little control of most things. Students are changing and we cannot control that situation — nor should we seek to. Why? Because most people I know — including myself — do not like to be controlled.  We can and should attempt to pulse check these sorts of changes, plan some experiments around them, and then see and report on what works and what doesn’t work.  This all relates to something I saw on earlier today on Twitter from Anya Kamenetz (@anya1anya):

If you declare a no-media classroom, you better be damn fascinating.

 

 

Also, a relevant quote:

The biggest problem area for teachers is students’ attention span, with 71% saying saying entertainment media use has hurt students either “a lot” (34%) or “somewhat” (37%) in that area.

— from Children, Teens, and Entertainment Media: The View From The Classroom
A Common Sense Media Research Study – NEW REPORT
November 1, 2012
Download the full report

Why is American Higher Education so averse to change? — from Jeff Selingo

Excerpt:

In my 15 years of reporting on higher education—and especially in the last year as I have reported for my forthcoming book on the future of higher education—colleges and universities have come to remind me of other American content industries that have been disrupted in the last decade: newspapers and magazines, music, and book publishing. In many ways, colleges and universities are following the same playbook:

 

From DSC:
I hope that higher education learns from what the Internet did to other industries.  I hope we can reinvent ourselves, stay relevant, and ride the wave to create WIN-WIN situations…and not get crushed by it.

 

 

Rethink college: 3 takeaways from the TIME Summit on Higher Education — from nation.time.com by Kayla Webley

Excerpt:

For a room full of academics talking about the future of higher education, the conversation was surprisingly blunt.  Yesterday TIME gathered more than 100 college presidents and other experts from across the U.S. to talk about the biggest problems facing higher education, which U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan summed up for the room as “high prices, low completion rates, and too little accountability.”

 

 

Also see:

  • Higher-Education Poll– from nation.time.com by Josh Sanburn
    Excerpt:
    The American public and senior administrators at U.S. colleges and universities overwhelmingly agree that higher education is in crisis, according to a new poll, but they fundamentally disagree over how to fix it and even what the main purpose of higher education is. According to a survey sponsored by TIME and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, 89% of U.S. adults and 96% of senior administrators at colleges and universities said higher education is in crisis, and nearly 4 in 10 in both groups considered the crisis to be “severe.”

The need for more experimentation, innovation within higher education.
By Daniel Christian for the CHFE12 MOOC

Last week, I attended the 18th Annual Sloan Consortium on Online Learning in Orlando, FL (USA). After hearing Sebastian Thrun’s excellent keynote address, I was very troubled by a couple of questions that kept arising in my mind (which I’ll get to in a minute). It turns out that Sebastian had heard Sal Kahn at a TED talk a while back, where he learned of the impact that Sal was having and the pedagogy Sal was using.

Now bear in mind that Sal was not in education.  He was working in the financial services industry, putting together training-related items for his nephews/family members.

Then bear in mind that Sal Kahn has arguably had one of the most significant impacts on K-12 of any individual in recent decades – and even on institutions of higher education (in terms of professors investigating or starting to use the flipped/inverted classroom model).

Then bear in mind that Sebastian Thrun didn’t run his idea by anyone in Stanford’s administration! His email out to some folks started going viral, and within days the enrollment numbers were already in the thousands.  (And at that point he got asked to drop by his Admin’s offices! 🙂  I wonder what would have happened if Sebastian would have first asked Stanford’s leadership for permission…? It may never have occurred.)

Sebastian’s and Peter Norvig’s AI course went onto graduate 23,000 people (with an initial enrollment around 160,000). Then, there’s the related Coursera organization/endeavor — again, a business that needed to be created outside of the traditional institutions of higher education.

So, recapping things:

  • Sebastian didn’t run things by anyone in his administration
  • He ended up needing to create his own company – outside of traditional higher ed (Udacity)
  • He was significantly influenced by someone completely outside of  education
  • Coursera and Udacity operate outside the policies and procedures of traditional institutions of higher education

So, the following two questions arose in my mind last week:

  1. Why didn’t these innovations come from – or why weren’t they developed within – traditional institutions of K-12/higher education?
  2. Why did such influence have to occur – in great part – from outside of “the established systems”?

Any answer to these questions is troubling to me. But one plausible explanation involves leadership. Many of our leaders in higher education did not grow up with the Internet and with LANs, WANs, HTTP protocols, etc.  They didn’t grow up using the tools that today’s youth are using.

As such, they don’t always appreciate the power and potential of technology. I don’t mean to point fingers and play a blame game here. That’s not the point. The point is, leaders are people with finite gifts and abilities. Like all of us, they have been shaped by their experiences and they, too,  have their histories. They were moved into their positions of responsibility due to the needs of of the institutions at certain points in time. But the needs of those institutions have since changed.

The problem is, those in key leadership positions will either need to:

  • Quickly come to appreciate the disruptive, powerful impact that technologies can have (i.e. be sold on them) and strategize accordingly
    and/or
  • Find other positions (which most likely won’t be happening if normal self-preservation tendencies/principles of power continue to occur)

Blockbuster comes to mind as an organization that was once dominant, but disregarded the disruptive impact of technology and eventually had to declare bankruptcy. One can think of other examples from other industries as well (can’t we Kodak? Borders?).

Such reflections were reinforced when I read Selingo’s (2012) article from earlier today where he wrote, “It’s clear to me that the needed reforms for student financial-aid are unfortunately not going to come from higher education. Many financial-aid officials remain opposed to the model letter, as well as many other regulations.”

Like Selingo, I don’t see change coming from within the current system.  I hope that I’m sorely mistaken here, but from the pulse checking I’ve been doing, the conversation seems to be continuing to move away from traditional institutions of higher education (example here and another example here).  I hope that we can pick up the pace of experimentation within our organizations to find ways to lower the costs while still providing effective means of educating people.

Selingo, J.  (2012, October 15). In a Broken Student Aid System, Colleges Are Part of the Problem. In The Quick and the Ed. Retrieved from http://www.quickanded.com/2012/10/in-a-broken-student-aid-system-colleges-are-part-of-the-problem.html

Addendum/also see:

Sal Kahn and Eric Schmidt - at Google Talks -- October 2012

 

 

 

 

Tagged with:  

The coming revolution in health care — from inc.com by Adam Bluestein
To understand how the American health-care system is about to change, forget Washington. Look to the innovative companies hard at work on the future.

Excerpts/BIG IDEAS:

  • Medicine is a marketplace
    With new software, the doctor will see you now, not in three weeks.
    .
  • The consumer is king
    How to get good data into the hands of patients.
    .
  • The digital health record is here
    A cure for chronic paperwork.
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  • Health care is social
    Is the crowd smarter than your doctor? Just possibly.
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  • The house call makes a comeback
    A computer screen becomes an exam room.
    .
  • The algorithm is in
    Why smart software means better diagnoses.
    .
  • Your doctor is watching you
    How a simple text message can make you healthier.

 

Also see:

20 things educators need to know about learning spaces — from newsroom.opencolleges.edu.au by Miriam Clifford

Excerpt:

The 21stcentury is challenging old notions of learning spaces.

The idea that students must be seated at desks working in rows is quickly becoming archaic. Technology and collaborative work environments are changing the design of learning spaces. Experts hope that the emerging paradigm will translate into improved learning spaces and influence future architectural design.

Stephen Heppell and expert panelists recently spoke in Australia about physical spaces in The changing face of Education. Heppell, an international expert in the fields of learning, new media and technology, is known for his “eyes on the horizon, feet on the ground philosophy”.

He has moved countless organizations into the digital age.

Online Education Grows Up, And For Now, It's Free -- from NPR.org

 

 

From DSC:
Sending a special thanks out to Dr. Kate Byerwalter,
Professor at Grand Rapids Community College for this resource!

 

Also see:

 

Higher education used to be on deck, but is now at bat. [Christian]

 

From DSC:
My way of thinking about what’s happening to higher education these days borrows from the sport of baseball:  Higher education used to be on deck; but now, we’re at bat.

I’ve watched as the former power brokers throughout many other industries reluctantly got out of the dugout, nervously began their warm up on deck, and then timidly moved up to bat as well. They were trying to cling to the status quo. Which didn’t work.  We’ve all seen the results.  There are new power brokers in those industries now.  (Which is I why I assert that there is danger in the status quo — our organizations need to always be at the work of reinventing ourselves.)

If I had to pick the top 2 forces driving change throughout the higher education landscape, I would have to say the cost of obtaining a degree and technology-enabled innovation.

Control is an illusion; people will find a way.

 


The items below reinforced my perspectives when I saw them this morning.  They inspired me to create the above graphic, something I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time now.


Excerpt:

Our thesis with xEducation is that the internet is happening to higher education and that successful universities of the future will be those that find ways to generate value for its many stakeholders that go beyond content provision and teaching. What exactly that value proposition is remains unclear. On the one hand, content and (recorded) lectures can easily be shared with limited costs. The internet scales content exceptionally well. The human, social, processes of learning don’t scale. Research doesn’t scale (yet). Regional and national economic value generation doesn’t scale. In these spaces where scalability does not work well, universities will likely find their new roles in society. Over the next six months, we’ll explore and test this thesis and place the discussion of higher education reform on a firmer foundation than the latest tool and popular hype.

 

Latitude looking to kids for technology innovation — from technapex.com by Caity Doyle

 

 

Excerpt:

On their website, Latitude explains why they made the interesting choice to reach out to children for new ideas in technology:

Young people shouldn’t be merely passive recipients of media and technology, as they’re often thought to be — rather, they should be active participants in imagining and creating the future of the Web. Why? Because “digital natives” have a more intuitive relationship with new technologies than many adults have, and because they have different expectations about technology. They instinctively expect it to respond to them in very human-like ways — to motivate and empower them, often serving as a sort of companion, rather than merely a tool for solving specific problems.

Key quote/lesson from “How Barnes & Noble destroyed itself” — from fool.com by John Maxfield

An unnecessary tragedy
What makes B&N’s story tragic from a shareholder’s and book-lover’s perspective is that it wasn’t inevitable. The company would be in an entirely different position if its leadership hadn’t pooh-poohed online retail in the late 1990s, when the now-dominant Amazon was in its infancy. Consider this from its 1998 annual report: “Although it is clear the World Wide Web, with its profound possibilities, will become a major component of the future of bookselling and publishing, we believe retail bookstores will remain the foundation of our industry . . . shopping and browsing in a bookstore is an irreplaceable experience, and it is woven securely into the fabric of our American culture [emphasis added].”

From DSC:
I love going to B&N; sipping some coffee and reading a book. So don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy the physical experience of going to a bookstore. But the lesson for higher ed — as well as for the corporate world — is that technology cannot be pooh-poohed and shoved aside.  Those who do so will be very sorry that they chose that route. There can be danger in pursuing the status quo.

How about your organization…is there solid representation of technology on your board/executive suite/leadership team?

My last thought here relates to my posting  What happens in our hearts has very practical, relevant implications in our daily lives

In 2009, the company paid its chairman of the board, Len Riggio, nearly $600 million for B&N College, an amalgamation of campus-based bookstores that controlled the rights to the parent company’s trade name and was then owned by Riggio and his wife.

At the time, it looked like a classic covetous overreach by an executive to extract capital without selling shares. When all that’s left of B&N is a Harvard case study, however, my guess is that this blatant display of avarice and disregard for minority shareholders will be characterized more ominously as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

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Also relevant here:

The rise of the multinational university — from universityworldnews.com by Geoff Maslen
Excerpt:

More than 200 degree-granting international branch campuses of universities are now located in foreign countries. But a new report says some universities are considering transforming the branch campus model into fully fledged multinational universities “by slicing up the global value chain in ways akin to multinational corporations”.

Prepared by Sean Gallagher and Geoffrey Garrett from the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney Business School, the draft report says many of these universities are focusing on China because of its scale and rapid development, and on Singapore because of its aggressive government policy and high level of development.

Also see:

Disruptive Higher Education is Opening Access Worldwide — from evolllution.com by Thomas Gibbons | 2012-2013 President, UPCEA
Excerpt:

Something extraordinary is taking place in higher education. Not a week goes by without a national headline about the latest “it” initiative in the online learning world.

This summer a dozen highly ranked universities announced signing up with Coursera, a private start-up that will offer free online classes. They join forces with founding institutions Stanford, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan.

What is certain is that the walls of the most exclusive universities are coming down—but not in a bad way. Many of our great universities have prided themselves on creating the highest-quality learning communities with the world’s best faculty, premiere research facilities and most beautiful campuses, but they have also defined their greatness by not how many students they educate but by how few they allow within their hallowed walls.

 

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Issues Wake-up Call to Higher Ed

Also see:

 

 

The financially sustainable university — from bain.com, a Bain Brief by Jeff Denneen and Tom Dretle

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Still, at the majority of institutions, the pace of change is slower than it needs to be. Plenty of hurdles exist, including the belief that things will return to the way they always were. (Note: They won’t.) But the biggest obstacle is more fundamental: While leaders might have a sense of what needs to be done, they may not know how to achieve the required degree of change that will allow their institution not just to survive, but also thrive with a focused strategy and a sustainable financial base.

Too often, stakeholders believe that the current cash crunch and need for change is a temporary phenomenon that will subside as the economy continues to improve. But those who see things this way probably haven’t been exposed to the data presented here and in other reports that show convincingly that this time is different. Faculty and other key stakeholders must be shown clear and compelling facts to disprove the “return to the status quo” notion and to clarify the corresponding negative implications and consequences of inaction.

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The Financially Sustainable University - July 2012 - a Bain Brief by Denneen & Dretle

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